If Men, Then
Poems
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
A darkly humorous new collection of poems by the Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and author of Wideawake Field and Amity and Prosperity
If Men, Then, Eliza Griswold’s second poetry collection, charts a radical spiritual journey through catastrophe. Griswold’s language is forthright and intimate as she steers between the chaos of a tumultuous inner world and an external landscape littered with SUVs, CBD oil, and go bags, talismans of our time. Alternately searing and hopeful, funny and fraught, the poems explore the world’s fracturing through the collapse of the ego, embodied in a character named “I”—a soul attempting to wrestle with itself in the face of an unfolding tragedy.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Pulitzer-winning journalist Griswold (Amity and Prosperity) examines the relationship between toxic masculinity, violence, and the creation of public narrative in her incisive poetry debut. Griswold suggests that the conventions of storytelling incite and erase violence against historically marginalized people: "Twenty men crossing a bridge,/ into a village,/ is not a metaphor/ but prelude to a massacre," she warns. She highlights the way language distances viewers from the escalating violence that floods the news, suggesting various power structures inform which stories are told, and which elicit sympathy: "The Fox News guy slipping his phone number/ over the anchor's desk,/ below the camera's eye;/ the radio host calling her a failure for/ becoming a mother." Griswold presents the news as inextricable from traditional beliefs about gender and power. Yet the speaker of these poems, "eager to share any awful story," frequently calls attention to the variability of beliefs about storytelling, and it is in this instability that she discovers agency, hope, and the possibility of redemption. She writes, as though describing the movement of the poems themselves: "She was warden of an angry garden,/ guarding against what hoped to grow." This well-timed exploration of violence and language is an exciting introduction to Griswold's work.
